Engineering Transformation in Retail: Modernizing Retail Platforms and Experiences

In today’s dynamic retail landscape, the ability to adapt, innovate, and deliver seamless customer experiences is more critical than ever. Retailers face mounting pressure to modernize legacy systems, harness the power of data and AI, and create agile, scalable platforms that keep pace with rapidly shifting consumer expectations. Publicis Sapient stands at the forefront of this transformation, leveraging deep engineering and product expertise to help retailers reimagine their businesses for a digital-first world.

Publicis Sapient’s commitment to retail innovation is recognized by leading industry analysts. The company has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Professional Services for Retailers, as well as in assessments for Retail Commerce Platform and Retail Point of Sale Service Providers. These accolades reflect Publicis Sapient’s ability to deliver transformative solutions that drive growth, efficiency, and customer-centricity for retailers across the globe.

At the heart of Publicis Sapient’s approach is the SPEED methodology—encompassing Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data & AI. This holistic framework enables retailers to address their most pressing challenges:

• Strategy: Aligning technology investments with business goals to ensure every initiative drives measurable value.
• Product: Building and scaling digital products that meet evolving customer needs and unlock new revenue streams.
• Experience: Designing seamless, personalized experiences that foster loyalty and differentiate brands in a crowded marketplace.
• Engineering: Modernizing platforms and processes with agile, cloud-native architectures, microservices, and automation.
• Data & AI: Leveraging advanced analytics and AI to inform decision-making, optimize operations, and create intelligent, adaptive experiences.

This integrated approach ensures that retailers are not just keeping up with change, but leading it—transforming their operations, customer engagement, and business outcomes.

Retailers often grapple with complex, siloed legacy systems that hinder innovation and slow time-to-market. Publicis Sapient’s engineering transformation services are designed to break down these barriers, enabling retailers to:

• Migrate and modernize core platforms using cloud technologies, unlocking scalability, resilience, and cost efficiencies.
• Adopt microservices and API-driven architectures to foster agility, accelerate digital innovation, and enable seamless integration across channels and partners.
• Implement site reliability engineering and automation to ensure platforms are robust, secure, and capable of supporting peak demand.
• Leverage composable, MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) architectures to future-proof commerce experiences and rapidly respond to market shifts.

Publicis Sapient’s expertise in these areas is underscored by its membership in the MACH Alliance and its track record of powering a significant share of North American online retail revenue through platforms it has designed, built, or supported.

Cloud transformation is a cornerstone of modern retail engineering. Publicis Sapient’s leadership in cloud professional services is highlighted by its breadth of cloud lifecycle expertise and next-generation tools. Strategic partnerships with leading cloud providers—including AWS and Google Cloud—enable Publicis Sapient to deliver:

• Accelerated migration of legacy workloads to the cloud, reducing operational complexity and enabling rapid scaling.
• AI-powered solutions that personalize customer experiences, optimize supply chains, and automate marketing and operations.
• Enterprise-ready platforms such as Bodhi and Sapient Slingshot, which leverage generative AI and machine learning to drive legacy modernization and streamline the software development lifecycle.

These capabilities empower retailers to harness their data, deploy intelligent automation, and deliver the hyper-personalized experiences that today’s consumers expect.

Publicis Sapient’s engineering transformation is underpinned by a global delivery model and a culture of continuous improvement. With a distributed network of talent hubs—including significant investments in India and Europe—the company brings together world-class engineering talent and agile delivery practices to ensure speed, quality, and innovation at scale.

The acquisition of leading software engineering firms and the expansion of global capability centers have further strengthened Publicis Sapient’s ability to deliver complex, high-impact retail transformation projects. This global reach, combined with deep local expertise, enables the company to support retailers wherever they operate, adapting solutions to regional market dynamics and consumer behaviors.

Publicis Sapient’s engineering transformation approach has delivered measurable results for some of the world’s leading retailers:

• A leading global sportswear brand partnered with Publicis Sapient to address service interruptions on its e-commerce platform, which were costing millions in lost sales. By implementing a site reliability engineering strategy and modernizing cloud resources, the brand achieved an 85% decrease in mean time to resolve issues, an 83% decrease in mean time to detect issues, and a 37% reduction in revenue loss year over year.
• A major U.S. grocery chain sought to stay ahead of innovation by adopting agile ways of working and building a dedicated e-commerce marketplace. The result: $1 billion in annual revenue from general merchandising, $500 million from international grocery e-commerce, and a 35% improvement in e-commerce order picking rate.
• A large physical retailer transformed its customer experience by redesigning its website as a mobile-first, multichannel platform, launching an online grocery experience, and integrating touchless checkout. The result was a seamless, flexible, omnichannel experience that addresses immediate consumer needs and allows for future digital and physical integration.

As the retail industry continues to evolve, engineering transformation will remain a critical enabler of growth and differentiation. Publicis Sapient’s recognized leadership, proven SPEED methodology, and commitment to innovation position it as the partner of choice for retailers seeking to modernize their platforms and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

By combining strategic vision, product excellence, and world-class engineering, Publicis Sapient empowers retailers to not only meet the demands of today’s digital economy but to shape the future of retail itself.

Ready to modernize your retail platforms and experiences? Connect with Publicis Sapient to engineer what’s next for your business.

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